20 research outputs found
Posthumous Release for Lay Women in Tang China: Two Cases from the Longmen Grottoes
No full textFamous for its cliff-carved Buddhist cave-shrines, Longmen was also a burial ground that attracted a few women from the seventh and the eighth centuries. This paper examines the burial caves of two lay women, Lady Lou (d. 661) and Lady Zhang (c. 658–c. 718), in relation to the newly excavated archaeological material and epigraphic evidence. Lady Lou compared her cave burial to the Indian ascetic practice in the forest of Śītavana but did not enact the compassionate offering of flesh. Lady Zhang was later removed from her burial cave by her sons so that she could be interred in a joint tomb with her husband. Through these two cases, I investigate the motivations behind the adoption of cave burials in medieval China. Canonical Buddhist scriptures taught these women that their social gender presented an obstacle to the final release. Dedicatory inscriptions at women’s burials and two tales of miraculous events at Longmen further suggest that family ties, an important constituent of women’s social gender, were believed to persist posthumously. Married women were expected to maintain their spousal and parental relations in the afterlife, and unmarried girls were imagined as turning into seductive spirits because of their lack of spousal union in their lifetime. I argue that cave burials at Longmen were not a compromise of the Indian ascetic practice but rather presented these lay women with a socially acceptable way to break free from their familial attachments after death
The Landscape of the Longmen Grottoes: Practices, Repentance, Jeweled Buddhas, and Burials under Emperor Wu Zhao (r. 690–705 CE)
No full textThis dissertation adopts a spatial-analysis and gender-studies approach to study the Buddhist visual culture of the Longmen Grottoes, where 2,345 cave-shrines were carved into the limestone cliffs on both sides of the River Yi (Yihe 伊河) from the fifth to the tenth centuries. Focusing on the seventh and eighth centuries, I examine the affective relationship between the constructed landscape of Longmen and people’s activities within the environment. Previous scholarship has engaged in discussions on the style, iconography, and patronage of Longmen sculptures. I make use of newly excavated archaeological material to investigate the site from the new and holistic perspective of landscape. I believe it is through interaction with the constructed landscape that medieval Buddhists experienced the power of the images and were motivated to participate by sponsoring a statue or a cave-shrine. To this end, I address two interconnected questions: how did the landscape take form? And how did the constructed sacred space answer the aspirations of its visitors? My goal is to reconstruct the landscape of Longmen as a matter of temporal, embodied experience. I argue that the lived experience of medieval Buddhists in Tang China (618–907) transformed the landscape of Longmen into the shape that we know of today. For the devoted Buddhists, the entire landscape was an affective space wherein one may attain the Huayan vision of enlightenment and release. At the same time, general visitors also understood the constructed landscape as a support for the claim of Wu Zhao (r. 690–705 CE), the only female monarch in Chinese history, as the sagely cakravartin, or universal ruler
Driver take-over reaction in autonomous vehicles with rotatable seats
No full textA new concept in the interior design of autonomous vehicles is rotatable or swivelling seats that allow people sitting in the front row to rotate their seats and face backwards. In the current study, we used a take-over request task conducted in a fixed-based driving simulator to compare two conditions, driver front-facing and rear-facing. Thirty-six adult drivers participated in the experiment using a within-subject design with take-over time budget varied. Take-over reaction time, remaining action time, crash, situation awareness and trust in automation were measured. Repeated measures ANOVA and Generalized Linear Mixed Model were conducted to analyze the results. The results showed that the rear-facing configuration led to longer take-over reaction time (on average 1.56 s longer than front-facing, p < 0.001), but it caused drivers to intervene faster after they turned back their seat in comparison to the traditional front-facing configuration. Situation awareness in both front-facing and rear-facing autonomous driving conditions were significantly lower (p < 0.001) than the manual driving condition, but there was no significant difference between the two autonomous driving conditions (p = 1.000). There was no significant difference of automation trust between front-facing and rear-facing conditions (p = 0.166). The current study showed that in a fixed-based simulator representing a conditionally autonomous car, when using the rear-facing driver seat configuration (where participants rotated the seat by themselves), participants had longer take-over reaction time overall due to physical turning, but they intervened faster after they turned back their seat for take-over response in comparison to the traditional front-facing seat configuration. This behavioral change might be at the cost of reduced take-over response quality. Crash rate was not significantly different in the current laboratory study (overall the average rate of crash was 11%). A limitation of the current study is that the driving simulator does not support other measures of take-over request (TOR) quality such as minimal time to collision and maximum magnitude of acceleration. Based on the current study, future studies are needed to further examine the effect of rotatable seat configurations with more detailed analysis of both TOR speed and quality measures as well as in real world driving conditions for better understanding of their safety implications
Improving Domain Generalization on Gaze Estimation via Branch-out Auxiliary Regularization
No full textDespite remarkable advancements, mainstream gaze estimation techniques,
particularly appearance-based methods, often suffer from performance
degradation in uncontrolled environments due to variations in illumination and
individual facial attributes. Existing domain adaptation strategies, limited by
their need for target domain samples, may fall short in real-world
applications. This letter introduces Branch-out Auxiliary Regularization (BAR),
an innovative method designed to boost gaze estimation's generalization
capabilities without requiring direct access to target domain data.
Specifically, BAR integrates two auxiliary consistency regularization branches:
one that uses augmented samples to counteract environmental variations, and
another that aligns gaze directions with positive source domain samples to
encourage the learning of consistent gaze features. These auxiliary pathways
strengthen the core network and are integrated in a smooth, plug-and-play
manner, facilitating easy adaptation to various other models. Comprehensive
experimental evaluations on four cross-dataset tasks demonstrate the
superiority of our approach
Investigating user activities and the corresponding requirements for information and functions in autonomous vehicles of the future
No full textThe final publication is available at Elsevier via https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ergon.2020.103044. © 2020. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/The potential benefits of autonomous vehicles, including safety, convenience, fuel economy, and low emissions can only be achieved when consumers are comfortable with the vehicle design. There are only a limited number of user studies in the design of future autonomous vehicles, owing to the difficulties of shifting focus “from the present to the future.” An integrated method of simulator study and user enactment was applied in the research to bridge the gap between the current and the future. Thirty drivers participated in the study to experience enacted driving scenarios in an autonomous vehicle simulator. The participants were divided into two groups, i.e., driving-alone drivers and driving-with-a-passenger drivers, to investigate the effect of passenger presence. Rich data were elicited about possible in-vehicle activities, the corresponding requirements of information and functions to support any such activities. Also identified were the preferred methods of interacting with the information and functions. Passenger presence was found to have an influence on the attributes of activities undertaken as well as the preferences for in-vehicle information and functions. Dominant themes were identified in future autonomous vehicle designs, including a more flexible and adaptive design language, concerns of trust and safety, and trade-offs between safety and convenience and between privacy and social connection. Based on the findings, design implications for future autonomous vehicles are discussed.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) || S.C. [RGPIN-2015-04134] || Hefeng-Nottingham Innovative Design La
Exploring personalised autonomous vehicles to influence user trust
No full textTrust is a major determinant of acceptance of an autonomous vehicle (AV), and a lack of appropriate trust could prevent drivers and society in general from taking advantage of such technology. This paper makes a new attempt to explore the effects of personalised AVs as a novel approach to the cognitive underpinnings of drivers’ trust in AVs. The personalised AV system is able to identify the driving behaviours of users and thus adapt the driving style of the AV accordingly. A prototype of a personalised AV was designed and evaluated in a lab-based experimental study of 36 human drivers, which investigated the impact of the personalised AV on user trust when compared with manual human driving and non-personalised AVs. The findings show that a personalised AV appears to be significantly more reliable through accepting and understanding each driver’s behaviour, which could thereby increase a user’s willingness to trust the system. Furthermore, a personalised AV brings a sense of familiarity by making the system more recognisable and easier for users to estimate the quality of the automated system. Personalisation parameters were also explored and discussed to support the design of AV systems to be more socially acceptable and trustworthy
Probing cultural differences in product design and consumer evaluation using repertory grid analysis
No full textCulture plays an essential role in the success of product design, especially in the age of a global economy where there is a high probability of discrepancy between the designer's intention and the consumer's response. However, the role of culture is often challenging to identify and measure. In the current paper, we employed Repertory Grids (RG) to investigate differences in UK and Chinese participants' evaluations of designs, which were themselves from both UK and Chinese students. The techniques of Honey's Content Analysis (HCA) and Principal Components Analysis (PCA) were applied to integrate the analysis of both the collected qualitative and quantitative data. The results show that the two groups tended to focus on a similar range of design aspects (i.e. aesthetics, form/shape, usability, creativity, and functionality), but apply different criteria in evaluating such aspects.The UK and Chinese designs were found to be distinctive from each other and tended to appeal more to the people from the same cultural background. The findings reveal the interplay between culture and design and underline the importance of integrating culture into design education
Bidder Subset Selection Problem in Auction Design
No full textMotivated by practical concerns in the online advertising industry, we study
a bidder subset selection problem in single-item auctions. In this problem, a
large pool of candidate bidders have independent values sampled from known
prior distributions. The seller needs to pick a subset of bidders and run a
given auction format on the selected subset to maximize her expected revenue.
We propose two frameworks for the subset restrictions: (i) capacity constraint
on the set of selected bidders; and (ii) incurred costs for the bidders invited
to the auction. For the second-price auction with anonymous reserve (SPA-AR),
we give constant approximation polynomial time algorithms in both frameworks
(in the latter framework under mild assumptions about the market). Our results
are in stark contrast to the previous work of Mehta, Nadav, Psomas, Rubinstein
[NeurIPS 2020], who showed hardness of approximation for the SPA without a
reserve price. We also give complimentary approximation results for other
well-studied auction formats such as anonymous posted pricing and sequential
posted pricing. On a technical level, we find that the revenue of SPA-AR as a
set function of its bidders is fractionally-subadditive but not
submodular. Our bidder selection problem with invitation costs is a natural
question about (approximately) answering a demand oracle for under a
given vector of costs, a common computational assumption in the literature on
combinatorial auctions.Comment: 17 pages. To appear at SODA 202
